The ‘Five Armies’ Gather On The Covers Of ‘Empire’ Magazine

Well, they prolonged it for as long as they could, but it appears that Peter Jackson’s stint in Middle Earth will come to a close in December with the third chapter of ‘The Hobbit’ movies, ‘The Battle of Five Armies’. The film cycle kicked off with the ground-breaking ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies and continued with the ‘Hobbit’ adaptations, which were expanded to accommodate three movies.

Now the titular “Five Armies” will come together in what may be the most epic clash of all time, with Humans, Elves, Orcs, Dwarves and “The Eagles” (I.e. Bilbo and Gandalf) coming to blows over the mystical realm.

Now, each army has scored its own cover to the U.K.’s ‘Empire’ magazine. You can check them out below:

This film should wrap up the epic battle with Smaug the dragon and determine who gets his golden treasure. But the battle promises to be one of the most epic in film history.

Director Peter Jackson stated:

“One of the things we did with the Battle of the Five Armies in particular, and in designing the script and the narrative, is that we made sure that the story that we’re telling in this third movie, that the story is continuing through the battle. So in other words, you don’t get the story to a point where everyone’s suddenly, ‘Oh, stop, we’re going to launch into a huge battle now,’ and then the battle’s over and you do a denouement in the end… We kind of pushed the story where the battle kind of interrupts the story, it gets in the way of the story, but the story kind of punches its way through the battle.”

And in this age of digital cinematic wizardry, Jackson assures this film won’t rely on those effects:

“People are jaded now with digital shots. Entire cities get destroyed and you can do anything else, and ultimately, it’s lost its fascination really, the CG, massive, big battle shots… We discovered a rule, basically, on ‘Two Towers’ on Helm’s Deep… You kind of lost interest in it if you went more than three, four shots at the maximum without picking up on where one of your principal characters was in the battle… We actually have a lot of conflict happening between characters, we have people in different places that are needing to get to each other.”

What do you think? Are you looking forward to an end to this epic or are you sad to see the end of the Tolkien cinematic universe?

Jax Motes

Jax's earliest memory is of watching 'Batman,' followed shortly by a memory of playing Batman & Robin with a friend, which entailed running outside in just their underwear and towels as capes. When adults told them they couldn't run around outside in their underwear, both boys promptly whipped theirs off and ran around in just capes.